I actually did know who Kevin Garnett was before today. In fact, we talked one time. It was a conference call though, lacking in intimacy. Those were the days before you could Wikipedia helpful icebreakers.

Like: "so do you ever think about the different path your life might have taken if you had been the son your father named 'O'Lewis Jr.'?" Or, "I've been meaning to ask someone what's it like to be arrested for lynching…" But this was back in the day as they said back in the day. And he had just signed a contract with Adidas, which used to outfit the Nazis, and I wrote a story that was all, "Kevin Garnett Tim Duncan whatevs." And Adidas was kind of proud of this fact because they'd just disposed of Kobe and then he had gone and raped some girl, but none of this did anything for sneaker sales.

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In any case, sometimes I think that it's bad that the internet gives everyone access to all this personal information about total strangers they might someday meet and think, "hey, I saw you on the sex offender registry," because it sort of takes the element of discovery out of first encounters, but I didn't realize there was such a wealth of discoverable nuggets of information to learn about Kevin, and that, I guess, is the difference between known and unknown unknowns, or as Malcolm Gladwell would put it, "puzzles" and "mysteries." Watergate, he wrote, was a puzzle; Enron was a mystery; and I am getting the sense that Kevin Garnett's future in the playoffs is out of our hands, but that said it seems to be what everyone's writing about this morning so I thought I'd start there.